Strict Measures Being Taken Against Toxic Behavior on League of Legends Beta Servers

For most people who play the popular MOBA game, League of Legends, it’s a tough exercise in humility. Constant bombardments of toxic behavior and shouts of “you should just uninstall!” seem to be more common here than most other games of its kind. So Riot Games is taking an extra step to block this kind of behavior in its public beta environment server.

The PBE is a premium server where developers can collaborate with the community to test out new features or work on game balance. “To us, the PBE is a premium server where we expect more from our players, and the standards of player behavior can be higher than the live platforms,” a Riot Games representative said.

“The PBE effort should be a collaboration between the developers and our community, and should be a place where players can play games with developers on any given day and directly contribute feedback that can shape the game.”

With that being said, Riot is introducing much stricter measures than it applies to the main servers.

“We have implemented a system on PBE that will automatically detect toxic behaviors and ban the players the same day – this system will go live today and will immediately punish 167 players with a seven day ban,” Riot said.

“Depending on the consistency and severity of the toxic behaviors, this system will hand out bans that range in severity from a seven day ban to a permanent ban from the PBE environment. This system will start off conservative and may have hiccups at first, but we hope to ramp up the aggressiveness of this system while maintaining a goal of 99% accuracy with a false positive rate of less than 1%.”

Riot is also working on other methods of discouraging toxic behaviour besides bans, which are not always effective and usually just end up making the trolls angrier.

“Our take-away message today is quite simple: the PBE has zero tolerance for toxicity, and change is coming,” the developer concluded.